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By Root 1783 0

called Google’s decision “heroic,” while Senator John Kerry said that “Google is gutsily taking real risk in standing up for principle.” The Internet guru Clay Shirky proclaimed that “what [Google is] exporting isn’t a product or a service, it’s a freedom.” An editorial in the New Republic argued that Google, “an organization filled with American scientists,” was heeding the advice of Andrei Sakharov, a famous Russian dissident physicist, who pleaded with his fellow Soviet scientists to “muster sufficient courage and integrity to resist the temptation and the habit of conformity.” Sakharov, of course, was not selling snippet-sized advertising, nor was he on first-name terms with the National Security Agency, but the New Republic preferred to gloss over such inconsistencies.

Even famed journalist Bob Woodward fell under the sway of cyber-utopianism. Appearing on Meet the Press, one of the most popular Sunday morning TV shows in America, in May 2010 Woodward suggested that Google’s engineers—“some of these people who have these great minds”—should be called in to fix the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And if Google could fix the oil spill, couldn’t they fix Iran as well? It seems that we are only a couple of op-eds away from having Tom Friedman pronounce that Google, with all their marvelous scanners and databases, should take over the Department of Homeland Security.

Google, of course, is not the only subject of nearly universal admiration. A headline in the Washington Post declares, “In Egypt, Twitter Trumps Torture,” while an editorial in Financial Times praises social networking sites like Facebook as “a challenge to undemocratic societies,” concluding that “the next great revolution may begin with a Facebook message.” (Whether Facebook also presents a challenge to democratic societies is a subject that the editorial didn’t broach.) Jared Cohen, the twenty-seven-year-old member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff who sent the infamous email request to Twitter during the Iranian protests, hails Facebook as “one of the most organic tools for democracy promotion the world has ever seen.”

One problem that arises from such enthusiastic acceptance of Internet companies’ positive role in abetting the fight against authoritarianism is that it lumps all of them together, blurring the differences in their level of commitment to defending human rights, let alone promoting democracy. Twitter, a company that received wide public admiration during the events in Iran, has refused to join the Global Network Initiative (GNI), an industry-wide pledge by other technology companies—including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft—to behave in accordance with the laws and standards covering the right to freedom of expression and privacy embedded in internationally recognized documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Facebook, another much admired exporter of digital revolutions, refused to join GNI as well, citing lack of resources, a bizarre excuse for a company with $800 million in 2009 revenues.

While Twitter and Facebook’s refusal to join GNI raised the ire of several American senators, it has not at all reflected on their public image. And their executives are right not to worry. They are, after all, friends with the U.S. State Department; they are invited to private dinners with the secretary of state and are taken on tours of exotic places like Iraq, Mexico, and Russia to boost America’s image in the world.

There is more than just tech-savvy American diplomacy on full display during such visits. They also reveal that an American company does not need to make many ethical commitments to be friends with the U.S. government, at least as long as it is instrumental to Washington’s foreign policy agenda. After eight years of the Bush administration, which was dominated by extremely secretive public-private partnerships like Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, such behavior hardly provides a good blueprint for public diplomacy.

Google, despite its membership in the GNI, has much to account for as well, ranging from its